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Thursday, December 2, 2010

NASA Discovers New Life Form

Very exciting and incredible news!

NASA has just announced today that they have discovered a new life form that in no way resembles life as we know it. Not necessarily alien, but a new life form which uses arsenic as a base as opposed to what other Earth-based lifeforms use: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. This is pretty freaking amazing!

The arsenic-based life form was discovered in Mono Lake in California. If you've never heard of it, here are a some pictures:

Looks like another planet, doesn't it? But it's right here on Earth, and has proven to be the breeding ground for a new form of life. This is the kind of thing that will force text books to be rewritten. This is the kind of thing that was once thought to be impossible. This is the kind of thing that reaffirms how important scientific research is to our species. Where's THAT in your Bible, Religiouso?

The newly discovered microbe, strain GFAJ-1, is a member of a common group of bacteria, the Gammaproteobacteria. In the laboratory, the researchers successfully grew microbes from the lake on a diet that was very lean on phosphorus, but included generous helpings of arsenic. When researchers removed the phosphorus and replaced it with arsenic the microbes continued to grow. Subsequent analyses indicated that the arsenic was being used to produce the building blocks of new GFAJ-1 cells.